“I had a white suit made in 1960, started wearing it in January – and found it annoyed people tremendously. It’s kind of a harmless form of aggression.” Tom Wolfe

The Pander Race To Nowhere

They Who Must Be Served

The election is over and the postmortem season has begun. The conventional wisdom is: The Republican Party is doomed unless it panders to the groups the Obama campaign put together to eke out a victory.

The coalition is the young, hip graduates of our left-wing educational system, Hispanics who want us to ignore immigration law, women who believe the taxpayers ought to provide them with free abortions and contraceptives, and other folks who think the system is rigged against them because it doesn’t redistribute to them enough of the fruits of other people’s labor.

When it comes to saying how the Republicans are supposed to attract such voters, the purveyors of conventional wisdom go silent except for the immigration issue, about which many Republicans believe their party should try to out-pander the Democrats.

In other words, let’s reward illegal behavior to win votes; never mind that rewarding illegality always produces more of it.

I think the Republicans should ignore the savants’ advice to go gooey on these issues because, in reality, the Democrats will not be able to satisfy these groups either.The government will not be able to find jobs for Ivy League graduates in women’s studies, nor will it be able to provide work and benefits for the unskilled illegal immigrants who are in this country now, let alone the unskilled immigrants that new liberalized legislation would encourage to come here.

Earth to those celebrating the Obama victory: There is no money to satisfy your demands, raising taxes on “the rich” isn’t going to provide anywhere near enough of it, and the Democrats aren’t going to be able to keep their promises.

Events, not demographics, will determine the political future. Does any rational person believe that Obama’s Iranian policy will stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and will prevent an Israeli attack within the next 6 months? Does anyone really believe that Obama will agree to reform Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in any meaningful way? What will the deficit and debt be next year or the year after or 4 years from now? $18 trillion, $20 trillion?

As Harvard’s Niall Ferguson said a couple of months ago: The choice is between whether we deal with the entitlements or the entitlements deal with us. It now looks like the latter.

Back to the postmortem. I am puzzled by the large number of Asian voters who went for Obama. What has the Democratic Party done for Asians, most of whom are self-employed professionals like physicians and small business people?

More importantly, Asians are the prime victims of the racial discrimination that results from racial quotas in colleges and professional schools. Asians must have much higher grades and test scores than blacks and Hispanics to be admitted to the elite schools. Which party considers racial preference a sacred cow?

And while I know it is upsetting to hear this, no group envies and despises Asians more for their great success in this country than their fellow Democrats in the black community.

In the end, the Democratic Party will go out of business because they will, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, run out of other people’s money to spend on their supporters. It won’t be the wars or Bush or the fundamentalists who wage war on women that get us. No, it will be the entitlements and the absurdly extravagant public employee union benefits and all the other promises the Democrats have made that they haven’t a clue how to keep.